Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Stendhal, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Stendhal quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 164 Stendhal quotes for you to read and share.

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A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road. -- Stendhal
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Great ladies are no more spiteful than the average rich woman; but one acquires in their society a greater susceptibility, and feels more profoundly andmore irremediably, their unpleasant remarks. -- Stendhal
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Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore. -- Stendhal
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In love, unlike most other passions, the recollection of what you have had and lost is always better than what you can hope for in the future. -- Stendhal
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I do not feel I have wisdom enough yet to love what is ugly. -- Stendhal
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To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face. -- Stendhal
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Indeed, man has two different beings inside him. What devil thought of that malicious touch? -- Stendhal
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An insane self-consciousness made him commit thousands of blunders. -- Stendhal
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When a man leaves his mistress, he runs the risk of being betrayed two or three times daily. -- Stendhal
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Conversationis like the table of contents of a dull book ... All the greatest subjects of human thought are proudly displayedin it. Listen to it for three minutes, and you ask yourself which is more striking, the emphasis of the speaker or his shocking ignorance. -- Stendhal
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Faith, I am no such fool; everyone for himself in this desert of selfishness which is called life. -- Stendhal
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Am I capable of deceiving my friend? Julien asked himself peevishly. This being, for whom hypocrisy and an absence of all sympathy were the usual methods of protecting himself, could not bear, this time, the thought of the slightest trickiness in dealing with a man for whom he had friendly feelings. -- Stendhal
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I no longer find such pleasure in that preeminently good society, of which I was once so fond. It seems to me that beneath a cloak of clever talk it proscribes all energy, all originality. If you are not a copy, people accuse you of being ill-mannered. -- Stendhal
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It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now. -- Stendhal
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Now that the steam engine rules the world, a title is an absurdity, still I am all dressed up in this title. It will crush me if Ido not support it. The title attracts attention to myself. -- Stendhal
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Alas! our frailty is the cause, not we! For such as we are made of, such we be. Twelfth Night It -- Stendhal
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Oh, if there were only a true religion. Fool that I am, I see a Gothic cathedral and venerable stained-glass windows, and my weak heart conjures up the priest to fit the scene. My soul would understand him, my soul has need of him. I only find a nincompoop with dirty hair. -- Stendhal
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The man of genius is he and he alone who finds such joy in his art that he will work at it come hell or high water. -- Stendhal
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Friendship has its illusions no less than love. -- Stendhal
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Wounded pride can take a rich young man far who is surrounded by flatterers since birth. -- Stendhal
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War was then no longer this noble and unified outburst of souls in love with glory that he had imagined from Napoleon's proclamations. -- Stendhal
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The pleasures and the cares of the luckiest ambition, even of limitless power, are nothing next to the intimate happiness that tenderness and love give. I am man before being a prince, and when I have the good fortune to be in love, my mistress addresses a man and not a prince. -- Stendhal
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At a distance, we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight. -- Stendhal
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True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors; it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things. -- Stendhal
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Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained. -- Stendhal
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People are less self-conscious in the intimacy of family life and during the anxiety of a great sorrow. The dazzling varnish of anextreme politeness is then less in evidence, and the true qualities of the heart regain their proper proportions. -- Stendhal
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I call 'crystallization' that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events. -- Stendhal
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A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness. -- Stendhal
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In our calling, we have to choose; we must make our fortune either in this world or in the next, there is no middle way. -- Stendhal
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Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things. -- Stendhal
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A very small matter, when all is said; only a fool would be concerned about it. -- Stendhal
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The tyranny of public opinion (and what an opinion!) is as fatuous in the small towns of France as it is in the United States of America. -- Stendhal
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It seemed to Julian that there was far too much hair in his wig. -- Stendhal
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It was the destiny of Napoleon - would it one day be his? -- Stendhal
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To seem sorrowful is not in good taste: You're supposed to seem bored. -- Stendhal
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Politics in the middle of things of the imagination is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert. -- Stendhal
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They were completely vague. They expressed everything and nothing. 'It is the Aeolian harp of style,' thought Julien. 'Amid the most lofty thoughts about annihilation, death, the infinite, etc., I can see no reality save a shocking fear of ridicule. -- Stendhal
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Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness. -- Stendhal
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The English are, I think the most obtuse and barbarous people in the world -- Stendhal
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His whole life had been merely a long preparation for misfortune, -- Stendhal
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The boredom of married life inevitable destroys love, when love has preceded marriage. -- Stendhal
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There is no such thing as "natural law": this expression is nothing but old nonsense ... Prior to laws, what is natural is only the strength of the lion, or the need of the creature suffering from hunger or cold; in short, need. -- Stendhal
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Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action. -- Stendhal
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Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness. -- Stendhal
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The first characteristic of Rossini's music is speed - a speed which removes from the soul all the sombre emotions that are so powerfully evoked within us by the slow strains in Mozart. I find also in Rossini a cool freshness, which, measure by measure, makes us smile with delight. -- Stendhal
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The first virtue of a young man today - that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its powers - is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to have much in the way of brains. -- Stendhal
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If you don't love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us -- Stendhal
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One-half, the finest half, of life is hidden from the man who does not love with passion. -- Stendhal
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A man who is half an idiot, but who keeps a sharp lookout and acts prudently all his life, often enjoys the pleasure of triumphing over men of more imagination than he -- Stendhal
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If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured. -- Stendhal
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For the future, I shall rely only upon those elements of my character which I have tested. Who would ever have said that I should find pleasure in shedding tears? That I should love the man who proves to me that I am nothing more than a fool? -- Stendhal
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On a cold winter morning a cigar fortifies the soul. -- Stendhal
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Want of exercise was beginning to affect his health and to give him the weak and excitable character of a young German student. -- Stendhal
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This religion takes away the courage of thinking of unusual things and prohibits self-examination above all as the most egregiousof sins ... It is one step away from protestantism. -- Stendhal
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Love has always been the most important business in my life, I should say the only one. -- Stendhal
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To write a book is to risk being shot at in public. -- Stendhal
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To describe happiness is to diminish it. -- Stendhal
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But passion most dissembles, yet betrays, Even by its darkness; as the blackest sky Foretells the heaviest tempest. Don Juan, I. 73 -- Stendhal
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The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same. -- Stendhal
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When you want to court a woman, court her sister first -- Stendhal
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Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us. -- Stendhal
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Any man who talks about his love affairs thereby proves he is ignorant of love and is moved only by vanity. -- Stendhal
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The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth. -- Stendhal
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Every great action is extreme when it is undertaken. Only after it has been accomplished does it seem possible to those creatures of more common stuff. -- Stendhal
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grotesque character of everyday occurrences conceals from one the real misery of passions. BARNAVE While -- Stendhal
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Love is like fever; it comes and goes without the will having any part of the process. -- Stendhal
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The suspicion that a rival is loved is painful enough already, but to have the love that he inspires in her confessed to one in detail by the woman whom one adores is without doubt the acme of suffering. -- Stendhal
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A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth. -- Stendhal
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Exalted by a sentiment of which she was proud, and that overcame all her arrogance, she was reluctant to let a moment of her life go by without occupying it with some remarkable deed. -- Stendhal
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These gentlemen, although of the highest nobility,' thought Julien, 'are not in the least boring like the people who come to dine with M. de La Mole; and I can see why,' he added a moment later,'they are not ashamed to be indecent. -- Stendhal
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I see but one rule: to be clear. If I am not clear, all my world crumbles to nothing. -- Stendhal
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They can only touch the heart by bruising it. -- Stendhal
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In Paris, love is born of fiction. -- Stendhal
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Love born in the brain is more spirited, doubtless, than true love, but it has only flashes of enthusiasm; it knows itself too well, it criticizes itself incessantly; so far from banishing thought, it is itself reared only upon a structure of thought. -- Stendhal
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People happy in love have an air of intensity. -- Stendhal
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sound reasoning always gives offence. Julien's -- Stendhal
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To find love in Paris you must go down among those classes where the absence of education and of vanity, and the struggle for bare necessities, have allowed more energy to survive. -- Stendhal
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I will never demean myself to speak about my courage," said Julien, coldly, "it would be mean to do so. Let the world judge by the facts. -- Stendhal
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Here are my politics: I love music and painting; a good book is an event for me; I'm going on forty-four. How much time do I have left? Fifteen, twenty, thirty years at most? Very well! I maintain that in thirty years ministers will be a bit shrewder, but just about as honest as they are today. -- Stendhal
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Spring appears and we are once more children. -- Stendhal
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Has he written to you?'
'He writes frequently.'
'Shew me his letters this instant, I order you'; and M. de Renal added six feet to his stature. -- Stendhal
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Far less envy in America than in France, and far less wit. -- Stendhal
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I used to think of deathlike I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possible thing that I could well avoid by my skill. -- Stendhal
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Love is a well from which we can drink only as much as we have put in, and the stars that shine from it are only our eyes looking in. -- Stendhal
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But, if I sample this pleasure so prudently and circumspectly, it will no longer be a pleasure. -- Stendhal
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This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom. -- Stendhal
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Prestige! Sir, is it nothing? To be revered by fools, gaped at by children, envied by the rich and scorned by the wise. -- Stendhal
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I cannot provide the reality of events, I can only convey their shadow. -- Stendhal
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Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all. -- Stendhal
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Love is like a fever which comes and goes quite independently of the will -- Stendhal
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An English traveller relates how he lived upon intimate terms with a tiger; he had reared it and used to play with it, but always kept a loaded pistol on the table. -- Stendhal
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I love her beauty, but I fear her mind. -- Stendhal
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A good book is an event in my life. -- Stendhal
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Life is very short, and it ought not to be spent crawling at the feet of miserable scoundrels. -- Stendhal
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The idea which tyrants find most useful is the idea of God. -- Stendhal
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Feminine delicacy was carried to excess in Mme de Renal. -- Stendhal
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It is better to have a prosaic husband and to take a romantic lover. -- Stendhal
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What is really beautiful must always be true. -- Stendhal
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Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion. -- Stendhal
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Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it. -- Stendhal
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It is something like love at first sight. An instant reveals to you what your heart had needed for a long time without recognizing it. -- Stendhal
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Love of the head has doubtless more intelligence than true love, but it only has moments of enthusiasm. It knows itself too well, it sits in judgement on itself incessantly; far from distracting thought, it is made by sheer force of thought. -- Stendhal
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The sight of anything extremely beautiful, in nature or in art, brings back the memory of what one loves, with the speed of lightning. -- Stendhal
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The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears. -- Stendhal
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The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent. -- Stendhal
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Women prefer emotions to reasoning. -- Stendhal
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Each man for himself in that desert of egoism which is called life. -- Stendhal
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Love is a beautiful flower, but we must be brave enough to pick her up from the edge of a precipice. -- Stendhal
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The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief. -- Stendhal
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The great majority of men, especially in France, both desire and possess a fashionable woman, much in the way one might own a fine horse - as a luxury befitting a young man. -- Stendhal
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It is with blows dealt by public contempt that a husband kills his wife in the nineteenth century; it is by shutting the doors ofall the drawing-rooms in her face. -- Stendhal
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I am mad, I am going under, I must follow the advice of a friend, and pay no heed to myself. -- Stendhal
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A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader's soul. -- Stendhal
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In matters of sentiment, the public has very crude ideas; and the most shocking fault of women is that they make the public the supreme judge of their lives. -- Stendhal
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Your water does not refresh me, said the thirsty genie. Yet it is the coolest well in all the Diar Bekir. -- Stendhal
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Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge. -- Stendhal
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Leave me with my life of the imagination. Your petty pestering, your details of real life, which all upset me to some degree, would drag me down from heaven. Each person dies as best he may; my wish is not to think of death except in my own way. -- Stendhal
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Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery. -- Stendhal
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It is not enough for a landscape to be interesting in itself. Eventually there must be a moral and historic interest. -- Stendhal
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Who knows whether it is not true that phosphorus and mind are not the same thing? -- Stendhal
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She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice? -- Stendhal
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Perhaps men who cannot love passionately are those who feel the effect of beauty most keenly; at any rate this is the strongest impression women can make on them. -- Stendhal
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People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure, even that to be found in reading a story. -- Stendhal
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A novel is a mirror travelling down the road. -- Stendhal
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I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase. -- Stendhal
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A woman of generous character will sacrifice her life a thousand times over for her lover, but will break with him for ever over a question of pride. -- Stendhal
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The only unhappiness is a life of boredom. -- Stendhal
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The more a race is governed by its passions, the less it has acquired the habit of cautious and reasoned argument, the more intense will be its love of music. -- Stendhal
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Since the time of Voltaire and two-chamber Government, which is at bottom simply distrust and personal self-examination, and gives the popular mind that bad habit of being suspicious, the Church of France seems to have realised that books are its real enemies. -- Stendhal
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Power, after love, is the first source of happiness. -- Stendhal
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All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few. -- Stendhal
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A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love. -- Stendhal
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The only way of touching a heart is to wound it -- Stendhal
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To the Happy Few! -- Stendhal
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Only great minds can afford a simple style. -- Stendhal
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Signs cannot be represented, in a spy's report, so damningly as words. -- Stendhal
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The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly. -- Stendhal
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Julien felt himself to be strong and resolute like a man who sees clearly into his own heart. -- Stendhal
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Beauty is nothing but a promise of happiness. -- Stendhal
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Napoleon was indeed the man sent by God to help the youth of France! Who is to take his place? -- Stendhal
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A girl of sixteen had a complexion like a rose, and she put on rouge. -- Stendhal
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I have a bad memory for facts. -- Stendhal
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I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction," said Mathilde. "It is the only thing which cannot be bought. -- Stendhal
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The idea of most use to tyrants is that of God, -- Stendhal
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One can acquire everything in solitude except character. -- Stendhal
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After moral poisoning, one requires physical remedies and a bottle of champagne. -- Stendhal
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Without patience, without absence of anger, no one can be called a politician. -- Stendhal
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Could anything possibly be more humorous than believing in the depth or in the depravity of the Parisian character? -- Stendhal
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There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness. -- Stendhal
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A novel is a mirror walking along a main road. -- Stendhal
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Every true passion thinks only of itself. -- Stendhal
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Courage was the fundamental quality in her character. Nothing was capable of giving her any excitement and of curing her of an ever-present tendency to boredom, but the idea that she was playing heads or tails with her whole existence. -- Stendhal
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The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years. -- Stendhal
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On the other hand in America, in the Republic, one has to spend the whole weary day paying serious court to the shopkeepers in the street, and must become as stupid as they are; and there, one has no Opera. -- Stendhal
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One of the traits of genius is not to drag its thought through the rut worn by vulgar minds. -- Stendhal
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A novel is a mirror carried along a main road. -- Stendhal
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I see but one rule: to be clear. -- Stendhal
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It is difficult to escape from the prevailing disease of one's generation. -- Stendhal
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Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion. -- Stendhal
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Beauty is the promise of happiness. -- Stendhal
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Our true passions are selfish. -- Stendhal
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Misery destroys judgment. -- Stendhal
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It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts. -- Stendhal
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Your career will be a painful one. I divine something in you which offends the vulgar. -- Stendhal